A note on Prototypes

June 5, 2012

The first prototypes for the game where created with paper, pencils, buttons and other stuff. We drew many sections with jumping sequences and puzzle elements to find out what could be fun to play and what is worth to be tested digitally in the next step of game development.
Analog paper prototyping is an important start and can at times get you a long way, but there is a point where you have to switch to digital prototypes to really learn more about your own gameplay idea. This might be the case even more with platformer games, that are more skill based than, for example, logic based puzzle games. Our programmers used unity for prototyping as well as for the final game. One of the definite strenghts of this engine is that you can very easily and quickly put something together that allows you to test basic ideas and features. For quite a long time we worked only with white cubes that we used to block out and test what we had scribbled in earlier phases.
This approach helped us to test out the movement of our characters and allowed us to play around with things like moving speed and height, jumping distances, and other features.
Besides the prototype of the gamemechanics, it was also very important for us to create a kind of visual prototype. As we were all Unity-newbies, we had to figure out what kind of light, textures, geometry resolution, etc. is possible with that engine. Our main goal here was not to define a final visual style, but to learn how to work with Unity as an artist.